Merchants by ldjsq
WebGL Version can be played here
How to play
Travel between the different cities, buy wood cheap and sell it high. Robbers between the cities will kill you when they catch you without currency. Also bring your wife some wood for her fires every now and then or she will probably die.. you know how she is.
Story
As a good husband you support your wife in her dreams... and more recently this dream has to do with burning down everything she gets. Help your wife achieving her goal by giving her the firewood she deserves, otherwise she'll die of her broken heart.
Travel four cities and exploit the differences in the wood prices. Use undercover networks or nearly legal price manipulations to your advantage. Deliver the wood in time to your wife and help her starting as much fires as possible.
But beware. There are robbers on the streets between the cities. As long as you have gold, they will just take that. But if you run out they will have to kill you to teach you a lesson. Stay away from them and the cold water!
If the robbers don't get you they will participate in educational programs to be better robbers and get you next time. How many fires can your wife begin with your help?
Graphics voting: The tilemap is from http://kenney.nl/ , but we made the characters ourselves.
Ratings
| Given | 28🗳️ | 36🗨️ |
If you are in T-Town and run to the lower left corner you get easily stuck and it would be pretty neat if it is possible to exit the game, maybe with some kind of ESC-Menu.
Keep up the good work!
Some issues I observed: (1) Is there a difficulty mode besides 'Hard' in the web version? I tried clicking on what seemed like a drop down menu, but no options appeared. (2) The volume of the audio in the game is very, very low. I could barely hear it when I turned the volume to max on my machine.
Theme is fitted, maybe not too much but is ok
Character polish is nice
The gameplay is fun and there are no major issues or game breaking bug
Overall: nice entry, enjoyable and fun
(2) We wanted the music to stay in the background but as it seems we went overboard with that
I really enjoyed the barter mechanics, though with the time limit, and so many robbers, I wasn't able to advance very far.
I especially loved the mechanics that robbers would get stronger (actually they just got more it seemed) on frequently traveled connections, meaning one starts to take detours to other towns to reach the destination safely.
@polkadotbot is there anything about the concept that you found bothering or that was hard to understand? We are very happy about any feedback :) Sorry about the Dropdown somehow not working, did you click on the text ("Hard Difficulty") or on the arrow? For me only clicking the text works somehow
@good-enough Thank you for the feedback :) Did you manage to put the difficulty on Easy? We thought about not making the water hurt you on easy difficulty but did not implement that yet. That would make the ice travel easier
@klianc09 thanks so much for playing the game so far! Yes, we also suspect the fire burning spree of the wife is not only about the temperature... A Sell All/Buy All button is a really, really good idea, thanks :) We just played your game btw and it is just amazing!
Basically you need to travel between cities and trade wood to make money and wood. In the Cities there are also NPCs with special skills that can help you. Between the cities there are robbers which get stronger the more often you take a specific path (e.g. if you always travel the path from T-Town to V-Village the robbers will be very strong there), so don't always travel the same path! The robbers will either take your currency (gold) or kill you if you have none.
You also have a loving wife who loves you and fires. So you have to bring here some new fire wood every few days (check the timer in the upper right), so make sure to bring here what she needs.
Ah you travel cities by walking out of a city (in the upper area there is a door)
I don't think it hits the theme very well. Currency is still currency, life is still life. I get that the risk of being robbed or killed is suppose to be the theme, but it still doesn't seem like your life is actually currency for anything.
I could barely hear the music so can't really say much there.
The graphics are great, though. Characters are cute and well drawn, I never had any question to as what any on-screen image was suppose to be.